Blogs

All the data in the world won’t help your IT performance

By Barry Cooks, Senior Vice President of Products, Engineering, and Support –

There’s a phase just after a critical infrastructure audit when an IT team or manager relaxes. The team has gained so much data after this in-depth examination that it seems inevitable the process would have solved some problems. That notion is incorrect. Data by itself is just information without the context or processing that turns it into answers, and it’s those answers that will guide enterprises toward the solutions for any problems an audit uncovered.

Understanding what your system’s data means

Ascertaining those insights beyond the raw data only comes with proper analytics. In the case of a critical infrastructure audit, it’s crucial to make sure the tool you’re using leverages the performance data gleaned during an audit, and then actually takes the next step of analyzing it to provide holistic assessments of an entire infrastructure. Ultimately, it’s that assessment that matter – not the piles of numbers and graphs. The end goal of managing IT performance isn’t to simply gain snapshots of IT reactions and responses to specific events, but rather to create an efficient and proactive ecosystem that proactively promotes uptime, availability and minimal latency; data without the analytics won’t help IT workers reach that level of efficiency. Analytics are what take that information and provide IT workers with actionable insights about where their system needs to be adjusted, and how.

Creating a solution-based IT environment

Aggregating all performance and utilization data to amass insights that inform IT creates an environment based on solutions rather than problems. As data is more effectively leveraged, IT departments have a better understanding of their infrastructure’s real performance. Aside from resolving issues and troubleshooting, this mentality shift has a positive influence on IT tasks. This positive culture can result in companies shifting from a perpetual “blame game” to working together to solve IT performance issues. Rather than companies investing in the usual “war room” approach to solving outages – that is, the traditional scenario where everyone gets into a room to address the issues at hand, and inevitably the situation denigrates to a finger-pointing exercise – vendors and internal IT teams collaborate to find the root cause and prevent future outages.

The information used to make crucial IT decisions is available, it just needs to be deciphered. Too many IT departments aren’t properly using their performance data to improve IT functionality. Leveraging performance data with solutions that offer analytics makes IT more efficient.